Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert.
Speaker 1: I got a question for you, Kenny. Have you ever
Speaker 1: wondered if it's possible to create a piece of digital information,
Speaker 1: like a computer file, a bit of computer code, a
Speaker 1: computer virus that could literally kill or injure somebody. Oh,
Speaker 1: of course I have. I mean having watched and enjoyed
Speaker 1: such films as The Ring, as Video Drone, like, just
Speaker 1: the idea of there being some sort of in these
Speaker 1: cases media, But we can easily extrapolate that to to
Speaker 1: digital media or just digital information. You can't help but think,
Speaker 1: is there is there something like that that could exist
Speaker 1: that would have a devastating or even lethal effect on
Speaker 1: anyone who interacted with it? Yeah, video file, audio file,
Speaker 1: computer program, something that comes out of the digital interface
Speaker 1: and actually harms you. Well, it's not hard to see
Speaker 1: how you could harm somebody indirectly with something like that.
Speaker 1: One example would be a computer virus that takes down
Speaker 1: a lot of systems or causes widespread economic damage. That's
Speaker 1: been happening since the eighties as well discussed. Yeah, certainly so.
Speaker 1: Widespread economic damage means people lose their jobs, and statistically
Speaker 1: we know that that will indirectly lead to some number
Speaker 1: of deaths above the mean mortality rate. But I mean
Speaker 1: something more direct obviously, you know, I'm talking about the
Speaker 1: cyborg ninja kind of stuff, But take away the cyborg ninja,
Speaker 1: I'm not talking about robot assassins or at least personal
Speaker 1: data like that's been another big one to write. I've
Speaker 1: seen accounts where people have said this individual is potentially
Speaker 1: suicidal over the leakage of the images, video or personal information. Sure,
Speaker 1: that's the devastating effect of digital gossip. But couldn't malicious
Speaker 1: hacker injured or assassinate somebody just with a digital file
Speaker 1: directly a piece of computer code video? Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: this is of course an increasingly important consideration, you know,
Speaker 1: because we just look at all the things around us
Speaker 1: that are becoming connected to the Internet that you know,
Speaker 1: years ago, I would have thought, why would I need my,
Speaker 1: uh let's say, my thermostat to be connected to the internet.
Speaker 1: It seems crazy, and yet here I am in the future.
Speaker 1: Especially during the cold months, I enjoyed waking up grabbing
Speaker 1: my phone and adjusting the thermostat, warming up the house.
Speaker 1: And at the same time, I'm thinking, is this a
Speaker 1: little crazy that this electric you know, gas powered fire
Speaker 1: in my home is now controlled by a device that
Speaker 1: is connected to the internet and all the horrors of
Speaker 1: the Internet. I end up just having to like stick,
Speaker 1: you know, push that out of my brain and just
Speaker 1: focus on the fact, Oh I can before I get
Speaker 1: out of bed, I can, I can make it a
Speaker 1: little warmer. Now. Fortunately, there are limits to what you're
Speaker 1: amostatic can do. Right, You're not worried about some crazy
Speaker 1: kid on four Chan deciding that he wants to cook
Speaker 1: you alive and turning your house thermostat up to five
Speaker 1: hundred degrees. But the more we think about a smart house,
Speaker 1: like there was some horrible sci fi movie that came
Speaker 1: out years and years ago, and it had a smart
Speaker 1: house that where the robot you know, goes completely how
Speaker 1: on everybody, and it had like a terminator arm that
Speaker 1: hangs from the ceiling and like travels around the house. Uh. I,
Speaker 1: As I keep thinking back to that, the more interconnected
Speaker 1: our homes become, and now that you know, the whole
Speaker 1: idea of like your house becoming self aware and killing
Speaker 1: you is one thing. But yeah, just the idea that
Speaker 1: all these things are connected, at least in a small way,
Speaker 1: to everyone else in the world, it can be a
Speaker 1: little much. This was explored to great effect in the
Speaker 1: wonderful Stephen King movie Maximum Overdrive. I'm just kidding, not
Speaker 1: not such a great movie, but the premises all our
Speaker 1: machines turn against us, right, our consumer technology, from truck
Speaker 1: to household appliances start trying to kill us. I think
Speaker 1: in the movie it's aliens, right, I can't remember in
Speaker 1: the movie. In the book, I mean the short story rather,
Speaker 1: it was delightfully vague. Um. And then of course Maximum
Speaker 1: Overdrive the film as its own experience. But I guarantee
Speaker 1: you there's got to be a script out there where
Speaker 1: someone has taken Maximum Overdrive, or at least trucks the
Speaker 1: original story and upgraded it to the you know, the
Speaker 1: so called Internet of things. Yeah, and the most obvious
Speaker 1: analogy from the movie is going to be autonomous vehicles.
Speaker 1: Autonomous vehicles if have if they have the wrong security exploits,
Speaker 1: if people can manipulate them in the wrong ways, it's
Speaker 1: not hard at all to see how they can be deadly.
Speaker 1: But I want to get even more insidious about devices
Speaker 1: that we personally hold in our hands and used to
Speaker 1: mediate our relationship with regular information like text and video.
Speaker 1: And you know ideas. I've got an archived Wired magazine
Speaker 1: article enti idled hackers assault epilepsy patients via computer and
Speaker 1: this is from March two thousand eight. And what happened
Speaker 1: in this uh incident is that somebody attacked an epilepsy
Speaker 1: support message board hosted by a group called the Epilepsy Foundation.
Speaker 1: And just to read a quote about what happened quote,
Speaker 1: the incident, possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical
Speaker 1: harm on the victims, began Saturday, March twenty two, when
Speaker 1: attackers used a script to post hundreds of messages embedded
Speaker 1: with flashing, animated gifts. The attackers turned to a more
Speaker 1: effective tactic on Sunday, injecting JavaScript into some posts that
Speaker 1: redirected users browsers to a page with a more complex
Speaker 1: image designed to trigger seizures in both photosensitive and pattern
Speaker 1: sensitive epileptics. And then later in the article they note
Speaker 1: and this is worth noting, epilepsy effects about fifty million
Speaker 1: people worldwide, but only about three percent of those people
Speaker 1: are photosensitive, meaning you've often heard, you know, the old
Speaker 1: Pokemon story that flashing lights or flashing images can cause
Speaker 1: seizures and people with epilepsy. That is true for some
Speaker 1: people with epilepsy, but not all. So the risk here
Speaker 1: is not necessarily like a wide attack where you just
Speaker 1: end up hitting that small percentage of people who are affected.
Speaker 1: But what have you targeted it after a specific individual?
Speaker 1: And this is apparently happened. Now we have this story
Speaker 1: from twenty sixteen where there's an American journalist named Kurt
Speaker 1: Aikenwald who was known publicly to have photosensitive epilepsy. And
Speaker 1: during the election, so he's a political journalist and of
Speaker 1: course being a political journalist you make enemies, and somebody
Speaker 1: who did not like his political coverage sent him a
Speaker 1: series of tweets with strobing light images. Uh and allegedly
Speaker 1: this caused a seizure. And so he is now a
Speaker 1: witnessed in a criminal prosecution against these digital attackers who
Speaker 1: attacked his physical body. And we're able to cause a
Speaker 1: physical injury with just information through an interface. It's interesting
Speaker 1: that it took place on Twitter too, because I mean,
Speaker 1: Twitter is known to be this place where like a
Speaker 1: lot of the Internet where where people feel like they
Speaker 1: can be just as nasty and awful as they possibly
Speaker 1: can without any repercussions. And and here we see a
Speaker 1: situation where it ends up transcending nearly the hurting of
Speaker 1: feelings or or psychological damage, but actual physical attack. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But while almost anybody can be psychologically harmed by information
Speaker 1: received through an interface, it's really difficult in general to
Speaker 1: physically harm somebody with information received through a standard you know,
Speaker 1: digital media interface. It's really rare. Like, there is this
Speaker 1: one specific exploit in the brains of three percent of
Speaker 1: people or so who have epilepsy. That means that certain
Speaker 1: types of light images projected on a screen can cause
Speaker 1: physical injury or it can trigger a seizure. Not everybody's epileptic, not,
Speaker 1: not all people with epilepsy have this condition, so it's
Speaker 1: it's pretty rare. But this is one neurological vulnerability to
Speaker 1: information based weapons built right into some of our brains.
Speaker 1: Most of the time, for most people, the brain is
Speaker 1: very secure, right, It's it's hard to cause direct injury
Speaker 1: to somebody's body, or steal their innermost secrets, or do
Speaker 1: anything like that with information interfaces alone. But today, we
Speaker 1: want to talk about how that state of affairs is
Speaker 1: very likely changing, and it may be changing very soon,
Speaker 1: because we want to talk about the coming age of
Speaker 1: neuro security. And the crazy thing here is that we're
Speaker 1: not talking about something that may come to pass. We're
Speaker 1: talking about, as you'll see, as we discussed this further,
Speaker 1: this is something that is definitely going to happen, that
Speaker 1: needs to happen, an inevitable next step. Yeah, and unless
Speaker 1: basically life or technological progress on Earth stops right now.
Speaker 1: This is not a singularity issue. This is not This
Speaker 1: is a very near future concern, yes, and and very
Speaker 1: very plausible based on things that we already have today.
Speaker 1: So there are several different things that you could call
Speaker 1: neuro security. One thing would be using neuroscience principles in
Speaker 1: the general field of security, right protecting your borders with
Speaker 1: f m r I brain scanners during border stop interrogations
Speaker 1: or something right picking up say, for instance, if you
Speaker 1: could use this technology to pick up on like extreme
Speaker 1: levels of nervousness that might need to be inspected with
Speaker 1: additional questions, or if it was even possible to tell
Speaker 1: that there was some sort of malicious intent or stocking
Speaker 1: up your t s A. The ranks of your t
Speaker 1: s A agents with scanners. I mean, like from the
Speaker 1: movie Scanners Psychic Psychic t s A. Okay, yes, it's
Speaker 1: basically scanner cops, the sequel to My God. You're right,
Speaker 1: scanner cops. Can you imagine the faces they make while
Speaker 1: you're standing in line? But that make flying better because
Speaker 1: it makes it funnier or worse because it'd be even creepier.
Speaker 1: Probably creepy, I'm guessing creepy. Sorry, Well, that's an interesting subject,
Speaker 1: but a subject for a different day. Today, we're talking
Speaker 1: about the security of our biological information systems, essentially applying
Speaker 1: computer cybersecurity principles to your brain and your nervous system. Now,
Speaker 1: you might be asking, that sounds ridiculous. Why would you
Speaker 1: ever talk about that? I mean, that's that's just such
Speaker 1: a weird sci fi scenario. Nothing like that's ever gonna happen,
Speaker 1: right right, I mean to bring up scanners again. It
Speaker 1: just makes me think of the first Scanners movie that
Speaker 1: at the time I thought ridiculous moment where the scanners
Speaker 1: are interfacing with the computer with their brain, and that
Speaker 1: threw me completely out of the movie because I'm because
Speaker 1: I'm like, all right, you you. I'm on board with
Speaker 1: brain to brain the psychic connections, but you're throwing me
Speaker 1: off when I'm trying to imagine a brain to machine
Speaker 1: connection that's just purely based on psychic power. It does
Speaker 1: seem to violate the magic of the film, right, It
Speaker 1: gets it gets the mythology out of whack because there's
Speaker 1: a scene in the movie Scanners where one of the
Speaker 1: scanners he gets on a telephone and he calls into
Speaker 1: a computer system and he reads the mind of the
Speaker 1: computer system. Yeah, and he wasn't even making facts machine
Speaker 1: noises with his mouth. That that I would have been
Speaker 1: on board with, but yeah, not the way Cronenberg decided
Speaker 1: to to display it. Michael Ironside could have sold those
Speaker 1: facts machine noises with his mouth, but not the guy
Speaker 1: they had play in the Here. So we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about a particular study that I'll get to a
Speaker 1: couple different times in this episode. But actually it might
Speaker 1: be wrong to call it a study because it's really
Speaker 1: more an attempt at definitions, right, trying to lay out
Speaker 1: what the concept of neuro security would be and what
Speaker 1: are some things we need to watch out for. And
Speaker 1: so this was published in two thousand nine in the
Speaker 1: journal Neurosurgical Focus. It's called neuro Security, Security and Privacy
Speaker 1: for Neural Devices from Tamara Dinning, Yoki Matsuka, and tada
Speaker 1: Yoshi Kono. So the authors of this paper note that
Speaker 1: there are three primary goals in computer security. You've got confidentiality, integrity,
Speaker 1: and availability. So confidentiality means what you think it does.
Speaker 1: It means an attacker of your computer system should not
Speaker 1: be able to exploit the device to learn or expose
Speaker 1: private information. Standard example would be hacker steals your bank
Speaker 1: account info, or your private emails or your private photos. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these are essentially externalizations of my private thoughts, and I
Speaker 1: don't want anyone to have access to either exactly now.
Speaker 1: The next one was integrity. Integrity means that an attacker
Speaker 1: should not be able to quote change device settings or
Speaker 1: initiate unauthorized operations. In other words, the attackers should not
Speaker 1: be able to use this device whatever it is, computer,
Speaker 1: cell phone, anything like that. Should not be able to
Speaker 1: use it for their own purposes or change what the
Speaker 1: device does for the primary user. An example here might
Speaker 1: be that a hacker could take over your computer to
Speaker 1: turn it into a bot. That's part of a bot
Speaker 1: net to have a d D O S attack against
Speaker 1: some website. Maybe they had a bad meal at Olive Garden.
Speaker 1: They want to take down the Olive Garden homepage, so
Speaker 1: they hijack your computer and make your computer one of
Speaker 1: many computers that bombard Olive Garden with with requests to
Speaker 1: load the page. Okay, and obviously I would not want
Speaker 1: that to happen in my brain, either to change the
Speaker 1: settings on my brain and ultimately change my behavior, change
Speaker 1: my motivations, like even if it's done in a very
Speaker 1: slap dash awkward way, like you know, hands out of
Speaker 1: my brains exactly. So the last one is availability. Availability
Speaker 1: means that the attackers should not be able to destroy
Speaker 1: or disable the device or do anything that would render
Speaker 1: it unavailable to the user. Classic example, hackered deletes all
Speaker 1: your files or alters the computer's boot procedures so that
Speaker 1: it won't load your operating system on startup and it
Speaker 1: just becomes useless. Likewise, I don't want anyone to strategically
Speaker 1: remove memories from my brain, to wipe my memories from
Speaker 1: my brain, or to even temporarily deactivate certain cognitive centers
Speaker 1: or networks in my brain. Yeah. Now, in these examples
Speaker 1: you're talking about, you're talking about sort of whole brain functionality,
Speaker 1: but there could be dire consequences for much lower stakes questions.
Speaker 1: Somebody might not necessarily be able to disable your entire brain.
Speaker 1: But in a minute, we're going to talk about some
Speaker 1: particular types of neuro technology. And in many of these cases,
Speaker 1: for example, just disabling your neuro technology could have devastating
Speaker 1: consequences for you. They wouldn't have to be able to
Speaker 1: turn off your brain. They might just be able to
Speaker 1: turn off your neural implant at a time and place
Speaker 1: that would make you very vulnerable or could hurt you.
Speaker 1: I experienced something like this the the weekend. I had
Speaker 1: to drive to a major phone service providers m brick
Speaker 1: and mortar store that I'd never been to before, and
Speaker 1: I had to do it without a functional phone. So
Speaker 1: I had managed I ended up printing out the wrong
Speaker 1: directions map quest or you know whatever map program I
Speaker 1: I used. It's amazing how dependently could come. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: in a way, it was it was like a part
Speaker 1: of my brain was not functioning because the phone was
Speaker 1: not functioning. You have offloaded part of your traditional capability
Speaker 1: something maybe ten or fifteen years ago, you would have
Speaker 1: probably had better internal mechanisms for locating a store you
Speaker 1: needed to get to. Uh, And now you've said, well,
Speaker 1: I don't have to worry about that anymore. That's in
Speaker 1: this peripheral that I used to supplement my brain. But
Speaker 1: if the peripheral breaks, you're you're messed up. Now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that is technology that exists, you know, quite literally,
Speaker 1: you know, arms distance away from the brain. But the
Speaker 1: thing is we're seeing the technology creep increasingly closer to
Speaker 1: the brain. And then what happens when that stuff goes
Speaker 1: offline or becomes compromised. So to quote the authors of
Speaker 1: the study I mentioned, they say, quote, we define neuro
Speaker 1: security as the protection of confidentiality, integrity, and availability of
Speaker 1: neural devices from malicious parties, with the goal of preserving
Speaker 1: the safety of a person's neural mechanisms, neural computation, and
Speaker 1: free will. Now we're going to look directly at some
Speaker 1: of the neural technologies that might be vulnerable to security
Speaker 1: concerns like this. But before we do that, I think
Speaker 1: we should look more broadly at the idea of information security,
Speaker 1: because if you're not all that familiar with the history
Speaker 1: of the Internet. It might be kind of puzzling to you, like,
Speaker 1: why is the Internet so horrible in terms of security?
Speaker 1: We we've got this global thing, what would you even
Speaker 1: call it? Would you call it a technology? We've got
Speaker 1: this global information civilization that is just terrible. It is
Speaker 1: just terrible in terms of security. There there is not
Speaker 1: an overarching strategy to keep everything safe. I keep thinking
Speaker 1: of it like the cat's cradle that you create with
Speaker 1: the with the length of string and your fingers, and you,
Speaker 1: you know, you interweave your fingers and you create a
Speaker 1: pattern so that the Internet in this case, it's not
Speaker 1: the string, it's not the fingers. It couldn't exist this
Speaker 1: without the string and the fingers. It's ultimately that shape.
Speaker 1: You know. That's kind of a loose way I think
Speaker 1: about it. Well, maybe we should take a quick break
Speaker 1: and when we get back, we can look at how
Speaker 1: the Internet ended up becoming so vulnerable to security concerns.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back, So, yes, how did the Internet
Speaker 1: end up becoming so vulnerable? Now? This is on one
Speaker 1: thing to take me on a trip on fear and
Speaker 1: paranoia memory lane, And I'll try and keep this this
Speaker 1: fun too. I guess if if you're a fan of
Speaker 1: like Halt and catch fire, it's kind of fun to
Speaker 1: think of it in those terms. But yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: on one hand, it's an easy question to ask because
Speaker 1: we live in a day where we have ransomware attacks,
Speaker 1: identity theft, docsining, invasion of privacy. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: so many of us were born into this system of
Speaker 1: the internet, or you know, or we if you're like me,
Speaker 1: you entered into it during college, and it's easy to
Speaker 1: just assume that the systems that run the world and
Speaker 1: the organizations that were in the world haven't figured out
Speaker 1: to some extent. You know, you expect the bank to
Speaker 1: be secure, You expect some security to to be in place.
Speaker 1: There are some rather significant security options to be in place,
Speaker 1: so you would assume that the the virtual bank would
Speaker 1: be much the same. Right if you were to just
Speaker 1: find out that there are human sized holes in the
Speaker 1: bank vault that keeps your money, that would be rather surprising.
Speaker 1: It's not surprising at all to find out that there
Speaker 1: are hacker sized holes in the digital systems that protect
Speaker 1: your private information. I mean, how many times now if
Speaker 1: we had the story about some online retailer or maybe
Speaker 1: even physical retailer that you did business with and they
Speaker 1: have your credit card number. They got hacked, and now
Speaker 1: your information belongs to somebody out there and you have
Speaker 1: to get a new credit card or something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think we can all relate to that kind
Speaker 1: of anxiety. Yeah. Now, I mentioned earlier that that so
Speaker 1: many of us were a number of our listeners here
Speaker 1: were born into the Internet age. So I'm going to
Speaker 1: try and put this in turn, like the origins of
Speaker 1: the Internet, in terms of something that maybe more of
Speaker 1: us could understand, but then not maybe not the younger people,
Speaker 1: but for a number of you out there. I bet
Speaker 1: you can remember the day that your mom joined Facebook.
Speaker 1: So you remember the realization that oh crap, this this
Speaker 1: internet thing, this this really is for everyone. It's that
Speaker 1: horrible moment where something that you and your friends do
Speaker 1: online that you think of as not real life comes
Speaker 1: crashing into real life and you realize like, ohhh, this
Speaker 1: is connected to the same universe where I live. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember. There was like a sharp contrast, certainly between
Speaker 1: the MySpace aide. Remember what it felt like to be
Speaker 1: on my Space was totally different than the early stages
Speaker 1: of Facebook, which was, which was completely different from what
Speaker 1: Facebook would become in terms of you know, just earlier
Speaker 1: models just felt like, oh, I'm just surrounded by like
Speaker 1: minded people who share my my same sort of attitude
Speaker 1: on life and and values about what's important. And granted,
Speaker 1: there's there was already a certain amount of bubble construction there,
Speaker 1: but but yeah, we we just we we had expectations
Speaker 1: about what this this technology was and who this technology
Speaker 1: was for, And the same situation really applies to the
Speaker 1: Internet as a whole. It's architects did not build it
Speaker 1: from the ground up as a global system for the masses,
Speaker 1: a cat's cradle weaved around the fingers of so many computers. No,
Speaker 1: they designed it as an online community for a few
Speaker 1: dozen researchers. It was a research project. It was like, Hey,
Speaker 1: we've got these computers at different universities and institutions. What
Speaker 1: if we could link them together so they could trade information?
Speaker 1: Would that be weird? I don't think that. Maybe some
Speaker 1: people did, but it doesn't seem like generally they predicted
Speaker 1: that this would become a hub of commerce and recreation
Speaker 1: for everybody on the planet. Yeah, I mean, it's you
Speaker 1: can you can't help, but compare it to say empires, right,
Speaker 1: can you imagine you have uh, you know Genghis Khan
Speaker 1: and he's sitting around and uh and they're saying, hey, Genghis,
Speaker 1: what's up? And he said, oh, not much. I got
Speaker 1: this idea though, I'm going to call it the Mongol Empire. Huh.
Speaker 1: And this is how it's gonna work. This is how
Speaker 1: we're gonna incorporate trade and the and this is how
Speaker 1: we're gonna value different religions. And there was whoa, you
Speaker 1: haven't even none of this stuff is even conquered yet.
Speaker 1: What are you talking about, like the people who found
Speaker 1: these these major movements and organizations? Like how often is
Speaker 1: the complete structure baked into the original design? Almost never?
Speaker 1: Each step is improvised. So you've got to make decisions
Speaker 1: about design. You make design decisions on the fly as
Speaker 1: issues come up. And the Internet was sort of the
Speaker 1: same way. Yeah, you gotta leave it to Kubla to
Speaker 1: figure out the rest. So um, there's a wonderful Washington
Speaker 1: Post article that that that goes into this in depth.
Speaker 1: It's titled a Flaw in the Design and uh And
Speaker 1: I'll include a link to this on the landing page
Speaker 1: for this episode it's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: In the article, the author speaks with such Internet forefathers
Speaker 1: as M. I. T scientists David D. Clark, David H. Crocker,
Speaker 1: and Vinton G. Surf. They point out that they thought
Speaker 1: they could simply exclude untrustworthy people. Is that great, We'll
Speaker 1: just we'll just keep the security risks off of the Internet. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So when they thought about security, and they did think
Speaker 1: a little bit about security, they thought about it mainly
Speaker 1: in terms of protecting the system from outside intruders or
Speaker 1: military threats. So there's a quonderful quote in this article
Speaker 1: from Surf, and he says, quote, we didn't focus on
Speaker 1: how you could wreck this system intentionally. You could argue
Speaker 1: with hindsight that we should have, but getting this thing
Speaker 1: to work at all was non trivial. They dealt with
Speaker 1: problems as they arose, and the problems then we're making
Speaker 1: it work, and now this is going to have some
Speaker 1: very interesting parallels once we start talking about neurotechnology again.
Speaker 1: They also point out that at the time there really
Speaker 1: wasn't much of value in the Internet. Uh. The analogy
Speaker 1: they make again to the bank people break into banks
Speaker 1: despite the security because or the attempt to break in
Speaker 1: because there's money there, because there's something of value, right,
Speaker 1: You wouldn't break into a bank vault or you know,
Speaker 1: risk prison time for a bank vault that was full
Speaker 1: of what transcripts of messages back and forth between academics. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, unless you're just in it for the pure
Speaker 1: artistry of it. But that rarely seems to be the
Speaker 1: case outside of like a Hollywood movie. But then, of course,
Speaker 1: in the early days of computers, you did start actually
Speaker 1: encountering security threats. Yeah. The big one that really changed
Speaker 1: everything was the Morris worm attack. Crashed thousands of machines,
Speaker 1: It got millions of dollars in damage, and it helped us.
Speaker 1: You're in the multibillion dollar computer security business. Bless the
Speaker 1: maker and his water. Yeah, I mean at this point
Speaker 1: that the party was over. Oh by the way. Interestingly enough,
Speaker 1: the article also points out that the big idea behind
Speaker 1: the Internet is at least partially attributed to American engineer
Speaker 1: Paul Barron, who worked for the Rand Corporation at the time,
Speaker 1: and he saw the need for a communication system that
Speaker 1: would function after a nuclear at strike on the United
Speaker 1: States that would help us with eight efforts help us
Speaker 1: preserve democratic governance and even enable a counter strike, all
Speaker 1: in order to help quote the survivors of the Holocaust
Speaker 1: to shuck their ashes and reconstruct the economy swiftly. What yeah, um,
Speaker 1: I mean that bringing this Cold War mentality to the Internet. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's so crazy thinking about the way contextual frames completely
Speaker 1: shift around the technologies that we create. Yeah. And the
Speaker 1: crazy thing too is that every time there's a headline about, say,
Speaker 1: meddling in elections with the you know, with with various
Speaker 1: online initiatives, or hacking initiatives, or the recent ransomware attack,
Speaker 1: it makes me realize, well, this is this is what
Speaker 1: cyber war looks like. This is this is the shape
Speaker 1: of global cyber warfare. And you look back and here's
Speaker 1: this guy dreaming of the The Internet is this thing
Speaker 1: outside of war, this thing that's just a communication system.
Speaker 1: It helps rebound from assaults by by various estates. But
Speaker 1: it's also this is creating the Internet in the context
Speaker 1: of thinking about international warfare, but thinking about it in
Speaker 1: terms of overt frontal warfare, missile bombardments and troop advancements
Speaker 1: and all the traditional types of war people knew about,
Speaker 1: not realizing that the Internet would enable a state of
Speaker 1: constant covert war between great powers that would just be
Speaker 1: constantly secretly or semi secretly undermining one another. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: there would the kind of this gray area about how
Speaker 1: how you respond? How do you how do you react?
Speaker 1: How does what are the rules of cyber warfare? And
Speaker 1: people still haven't figured that out. So that Washington Post
Speaker 1: article is a great exploration of Internet security history. But
Speaker 1: the basic answer to our initial question is this, you know,
Speaker 1: why is the Internet when of the Internet end up
Speaker 1: becoming so vulnerable? It's because the Internet wasn't built to
Speaker 1: be secure. All security concerns are an add on an
Speaker 1: aftermarket edition a patch. Security is always difficult, especially when
Speaker 1: it wasn't baked into the design and and and with
Speaker 1: these systems that we're talking about, it almost never is.
Speaker 1: We see the same situation occurring with with some of
Speaker 1: the gadgets and implants and proposed neural technologies we're going
Speaker 1: to discuss, because a primary goal ends up to being
Speaker 1: what to aid the patient to somehow to achieve the
Speaker 1: goal of the device or the technology. Right, if you're
Speaker 1: designing neurotechnology to help regain some lost functionality and somebody
Speaker 1: with a brain injury or a body injury, or to
Speaker 1: cure some kind of neurodegenerative disease, or at least offset
Speaker 1: it's negative effects. Security. I mean, that's just such a
Speaker 1: far down the road concern. You're you're worried about fixing
Speaker 1: people's problems and helping their lives. That's what you're worried about.
Speaker 1: And it's the same thing you talked about with the
Speaker 1: Internet earlier, that you know, people were just wondering if
Speaker 1: they could make it work. Security is so far down
Speaker 1: the list of concerns. Yeah again, security becomes this add on.
Speaker 1: It's this thing that you you you end up implementing
Speaker 1: or worrying about once the threat becomes more apparent. Oh yeah, security,
Speaker 1: not not in the kool aid man sense of oh yeah,
Speaker 1: but like the oh yeah, oh yeah, this there's a
Speaker 1: man sized hole in the wall. We need to do
Speaker 1: something about this. So I want to go back to
Speaker 1: that paper I mentioned earlier in Neurosurgical Focus from two
Speaker 1: thousand nine, where they try to lay out a framework
Speaker 1: for approaching the topic of neuro security. And so the
Speaker 1: authors make the point that neurotechnology is becoming more effective
Speaker 1: and one of the things that we can draw out
Speaker 1: from this is that as it becomes more effective, it's
Speaker 1: going to become more useful, And as it becomes more useful,
Speaker 1: it's going to become more widespread. And is it becomes
Speaker 1: more widespread, it will be more fully integrated into our
Speaker 1: bodies and our lives. And so there are a lot
Speaker 1: of current and potential uses of neurotechnology. One thing would
Speaker 1: be treating brain disorders. Another thing might be making paralyzed
Speaker 1: limbs usable again, or allowing users to control robotic limbs
Speaker 1: with thoughts alone. One thing might be remote controlling robots
Speaker 1: with thoughts. That's a fun one. Another one might be
Speaker 1: enhancing human cognitant of capacity. So up until the present,
Speaker 1: most research into the safety of neurotechnology is focused on
Speaker 1: making sure the device itself doesn't hurt you when it's
Speaker 1: functioning the way it's supposed to write. Safety concerns are
Speaker 1: about making sure that the intended use of the neuro
Speaker 1: technology is safe. And this makes sense because back in
Speaker 1: two thousand nine, at the time this paper was published,
Speaker 1: most of these devices were number one, contained in lab environments,
Speaker 1: you know, they're just not getting out into the wild
Speaker 1: very much. And number two were self contained systems, meaning
Speaker 1: that they had very little limited transaction with the other
Speaker 1: information systems in the outside world. Back when you had
Speaker 1: an Apple two and no Internet connection, you're probably not
Speaker 1: going to get a virus, right unless you're one of
Speaker 1: the very few unlucky people to get handed and infected
Speaker 1: floppy disk and you stick it into your disk drive.
Speaker 1: Of course, once you start connecting your computers to the Internet,
Speaker 1: your security vulnerability goes way up. Uh. And here's a
Speaker 1: cybersecurity mantraid posit for you. The more your device plays outdoors,
Speaker 1: the more vulnerable it is. Yeah. And this means that
Speaker 1: as a device gets connected to the Internet, interacts with
Speaker 1: a larger number of devices, adds wireless capabilities, all all
Speaker 1: those things, there are more ways for it to be
Speaker 1: compromised by malicious adversaries. And as devices become more useful
Speaker 1: and more widely adopted, they tend to play outdoors more
Speaker 1: and more. If and so, what the authors are saying
Speaker 1: is that if we don't design robust security features in
Speaker 1: them from the get go, we could end up with
Speaker 1: neurotech that works like the Internet we just talked about,
Speaker 1: where it's it's an ad hoc system of security fixes
Speaker 1: It's this constant race between security updates and malicious hackers,
Speaker 1: and every time the bad guys pull ahead, they have
Speaker 1: the ability to bring a little taste of doom with them,
Speaker 1: except this time the target isn't your computer or even
Speaker 1: your bank account or your Facebook account. It's your nervous system.
Speaker 1: And people probably will not find that acceptable, the victims
Speaker 1: of such accounts. That is, because inevitably the trend we
Speaker 1: see is that there will be somebody who decides that
Speaker 1: such an attack on an individual is a good idea
Speaker 1: for whatever kind of whatever reasons they have, or just
Speaker 1: sort of the the impersonal nature of online victimization. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, of course they're going to be motives. One
Speaker 1: of the things the authors point out is just straightforward cruelty.
Speaker 1: Think of the cruelty, both random and targeted, that we've
Speaker 1: talked about of those epilepsy strobe attacks. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: just sick. But apparently people think that's okay to do.
Speaker 1: There are people out there who are willing to inflict
Speaker 1: injury on others because they think they can get away
Speaker 1: with it. But then think about the possible financial and
Speaker 1: blackmail incentives that would be open to someone who compromised
Speaker 1: your brain itself, and then think about malicious interfering that
Speaker 1: is self directed. One example of this might be UH,
Speaker 1: in a minute, we're going to talk about the idea
Speaker 1: of deep brain stimulation or DBS. But there's a possibility,
Speaker 1: for example, of neurotech users to hack their own devices
Speaker 1: in an act of harmful self medication. So in the
Speaker 1: same way that you might abuse a prescription for painkillers,
Speaker 1: you could potentially abuse your neuro technology using it in
Speaker 1: a way that it's not intended that could be harmful
Speaker 1: to you in the long run but feels good in
Speaker 1: the present. Well, or to frame that another way, you
Speaker 1: could you could have a situation from where people are
Speaker 1: optimizing that their technology in a way that demand does
Speaker 1: not approve of. Yeah, you could have that, or you
Speaker 1: could have One example is overclocking computers. Right, people want
Speaker 1: to over clock their CPUs. Sometimes you see people messing
Speaker 1: around with their hardware and it means that you know,
Speaker 1: I know I can get more power out of my
Speaker 1: CPU if I if I make some adjustments to what
Speaker 1: it will allow itself to do. But that comes along
Speaker 1: with risks, right, you could risk overheating your computer or
Speaker 1: something like that. If people decide they want to do
Speaker 1: the same thing with their brains. Yeah. Yeah, then I
Speaker 1: mean basically you could say, I'm going to trade the
Speaker 1: potential to have more power in my brain with the
Speaker 1: potential for some risk. Yeah. I mean people do that
Speaker 1: every day when they they look at various pharmaceutical ways
Speaker 1: to potentially augment their brain for the completion of a
Speaker 1: task or some sort of creative endeavor. And reminds me.
Speaker 1: I believe it was Jimmy Page of led Zeppelin who
Speaker 1: has in some interviews like look back on past drug
Speaker 1: use and and said, well, yeah, that was probably too much,
Speaker 1: but look at what I got done. Look look at
Speaker 1: the work that came out during that time. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure if this is something he said or this was
Speaker 1: commentary on his life, but I mean you could see
Speaker 1: someone making the argument with technology to say, yeah, I
Speaker 1: overclocked my uh neural augmentations, but look what I got done, right,
Speaker 1: Sure did a lot of homework, so you could say,
Speaker 1: and I think the authors of this two thousand nine
Speaker 1: articles say that we're at a similar stage in the
Speaker 1: evolution of neural engineering as we were at the inception
Speaker 1: of the Internet. Neuro Security is not really much of
Speaker 1: an issue today, but it could be a huge, massively
Speaker 1: important concern in the near future. And the consequence of
Speaker 1: a neuro security breach can be a lot worse than
Speaker 1: a breach of Internet security. Instead of protecting the software
Speaker 1: on somebody's computer, you're protecting a humans ability to think
Speaker 1: and enjoy good health. Right, Yeah, you're getting far because
Speaker 1: because that's the thing, right, when all these bad things happen,
Speaker 1: So you suffer, even an identity threat, you can always say, well, hey,
Speaker 1: at least nobody was hurt. At least I didn't you know,
Speaker 1: nobody physically attacked me. But here we see that line
Speaker 1: somewhat erased. So a few current trends in neuro technology
Speaker 1: that are definitely going to up the stakes and increase
Speaker 1: the risks. One of these things is wireless connectivity. The
Speaker 1: authors in this paper they recognize that security vulnerabilities do
Speaker 1: exist in wireless implanted medical devices, and in past research
Speaker 1: they demonstrated that a hacker could certainly compromise the security
Speaker 1: and privacy of such a device, such as a two
Speaker 1: thousand three model implanted cardiac defibrillator. You see, you could
Speaker 1: they found using homemade, low cost equipment wireless lee change
Speaker 1: a patient's therapies, disable those therapies, or induce a life
Speaker 1: threatening heart rhythm. And they and this was a two
Speaker 1: thousand and two thousand nine publication, but the things have
Speaker 1: moved on a bit since then. But even then at
Speaker 1: the time they said, look, the current risk is very low,
Speaker 1: but such threats have to be taken into account with
Speaker 1: future designs. So there's increasing wireless connectivity of all types
Speaker 1: of implanted devices, including neural peripherals. But the other thing
Speaker 1: we need to take into account for increasing security risks
Speaker 1: is the increasing complexity of these devices. The more a
Speaker 1: device does, the more there is to worry about from
Speaker 1: a security concern. Yeah, and this is an area where
Speaker 1: I to make sense to this. I keep thinking about
Speaker 1: a chessboard. In a chess game, as many of you
Speaker 1: might be aware, Like chess has a set number of pieces,
Speaker 1: a set playing field, and uh in a set rule system.
Speaker 1: And people have been playing with these limitations for a
Speaker 1: long time, and in doing so they've kind of figured out,
Speaker 1: you know, all the basic moves that can take place
Speaker 1: early in the game and it it's opening the openings. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you it takes a while to get to that
Speaker 1: point where you're actually in fresh territory where you're playing
Speaker 1: a game that has not been played before. So it's chess.
Speaker 1: Is not like a modern board game where the board
Speaker 1: game comes out and then they might have a new rule,
Speaker 1: suit supplement, or a new expansion, and each time a
Speaker 1: new expansion comes out, ohops, they broke the game will
Speaker 1: a bit or the rules, this rule clashes with this
Speaker 1: older rule, and we need somebody to to weigh in
Speaker 1: and tell us, uh, you know how we actually play
Speaker 1: the game. Now, Chess doesn't change. Chess remains the same,
Speaker 1: and our our our world of interconnected devices does not
Speaker 1: stay the same. It changes. It is a It is
Speaker 1: a modern board game that gets gets a larger playing field,
Speaker 1: gets more pieces and more complex rules pretty much every day. Now,
Speaker 1: I think we should zero in on some specific examples
Speaker 1: of neurotechnologies. One would be robotic limbs. Now, I think
Speaker 1: this is a great example of something that has made
Speaker 1: enormous strides just in the past couple of decades. Robotic
Speaker 1: limbs are not the future, this is the present. Multiple
Speaker 1: labs and inter organizational projects have already created robotic limbs
Speaker 1: that can be controlled directly by brain activity, just like
Speaker 1: the muscles and a natural limb, and these things are
Speaker 1: better all the time. That's right. Now, to go back
Speaker 1: in time just a little bit back in two thousand thirteen,
Speaker 1: Bertold Meyer wrote an article for Wired titled ethical questions
Speaker 1: are Looming for prosthetics. Now. Meyer had a unique insight
Speaker 1: in this article because he wears a prosthetic arm himself,
Speaker 1: and he tried out many different models over the years,
Speaker 1: so he's not you know, he's an insider when it
Speaker 1: comes to prosthetics and the use of high tech prosthetics.
Speaker 1: So at the time he was using an i limb
Speaker 1: which connected to his iPhone, which of course was connected
Speaker 1: to the Internet, and he wrote, technically, a part of
Speaker 1: my body has become hackable and uh, and he pointed
Speaker 1: to concerns by crime futurist Mark Goodman, also a Wired writer,
Speaker 1: and Mark Goodman covered the fact had previously covered the
Speaker 1: fact that hackers had developed a Bluetooth device that can
Speaker 1: cause portable insulin pumps used by certain diabetics to give
Speaker 1: their where a lethal dose. Oh yeah, this is another
Speaker 1: one of the vulnerabilities of hackable implanted devices that don't
Speaker 1: even necessarily connect to the nervous system or the brain right.
Speaker 1: And if anyone out there is a fan of the
Speaker 1: TV show Homeland, there's actually a plot involving in a
Speaker 1: vice presidential assassination attempt in the show U utilizing just
Speaker 1: such a strategy. I've never watched that show is a
Speaker 1: good I enjoyed. I only watched the first two seasons,
Speaker 1: but I enjoyed it. So Meyer argues that we we
Speaker 1: have to recognize and address such hacking sensitivities before the
Speaker 1: technology is widely adopted and hacking becomes a full fledged threat,
Speaker 1: which just is exactly what we've been we've been saying
Speaker 1: over again. So Myer's on the same page as the
Speaker 1: authors of this article we were talking about earlier that
Speaker 1: they're saying. The main thing is we got to get
Speaker 1: ahead of it. We've got to start thinking about neurosecurity
Speaker 1: before these threats really become an issue. Now, there are
Speaker 1: plenty of labs that have been working on robotic limbs,
Speaker 1: thought controlled robotic limbs. One more example I wanted to
Speaker 1: mention there was a good article in the New York
Speaker 1: Times in May about the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics
Speaker 1: Lab where they've got this robotic arm. It's got twenty
Speaker 1: six joints and it can curl up to forty five pounds.
Speaker 1: Is that more than my biological arm concurl. I wonder
Speaker 1: get into an arm wrestling contest with one of these
Speaker 1: robot arms. I don't know. I feel like we're getting
Speaker 1: into the weight of human hair scenarios. Well, anyway, these
Speaker 1: things it's controlled entirely by the brain, and so it
Speaker 1: is just that you connect this to what your natural
Speaker 1: neural impulses would be, and you can't. You don't have
Speaker 1: to operate any external controls or machinery. You just control
Speaker 1: it with your brain. There was also a good article
Speaker 1: I saw and wired from last year. I think about
Speaker 1: President Obama just freaking out when he was watching somebody
Speaker 1: control a prosthetic arm with his brain. Uh, he like
Speaker 1: couldn't contain his glee. Yeah, I mean, it's it's amazing,
Speaker 1: Like and that's the thing that the technology has so
Speaker 1: many wonderful applications, um and and all of these additional
Speaker 1: threats kind of come second to that at least when
Speaker 1: you're you're focusing on the wonder Yeah. And so there
Speaker 1: are a couple ways you could say that neural devices
Speaker 1: would come into limb control. So one of them would
Speaker 1: be restoring the use of a disabled limb, Like if
Speaker 1: you have some kind of neurological damage or disease that
Speaker 1: means you still have an arm or a leg, but
Speaker 1: that you can't control it with your brain. One thing
Speaker 1: a neural device could do is give that control back
Speaker 1: to you. Another thing would be that you've lost the
Speaker 1: arm or the limb and that you have a robotic
Speaker 1: replacement that you can control with your brain. Yeah, these
Speaker 1: are These are two possibilities that that come up time
Speaker 1: and time again in you know, wired magazine articles and
Speaker 1: another cool uh cool, you know forward facing technological publications.
Speaker 1: Now we've mentioned a couple of arms, but that they're
Speaker 1: prosthetic legs too, right, Yes, I was looking around. I
Speaker 1: came across Blatchford's links prosthetic and this communicates from knee
Speaker 1: to ankle four times a second. So it's a stem
Speaker 1: in which the foot and knee of the prosthetic limb
Speaker 1: work to work together to predict how it's where is
Speaker 1: going to move and respond to the position. And this
Speaker 1: too features a bluetooth connection to a smartphone to help
Speaker 1: manage this interaction to like uh ad just settings and
Speaker 1: things like that. Yeah, so I mean, I guess that
Speaker 1: doesn't rely on the smartphone CPU to do it's computation.
Speaker 1: I guess that would be difficult. Um, my understanding is
Speaker 1: that this was about like tweaking performance. Okay, so but
Speaker 1: it's easy. That's the thing when you can see a
Speaker 1: lot of these technologies. Perhaps they start with using a
Speaker 1: wireless connection to tweak performance, but then it becomes more right,
Speaker 1: then it becomes about downloading new firmware. Then it becomes
Speaker 1: about actually using the computational power of the device or
Speaker 1: the cloud even to control the prosthetic. All right, so
Speaker 1: maybe it's time to think about what would be the
Speaker 1: security concerns of a robotic limb or a neurotechnologically enabled limb.
Speaker 1: One thing I got to think about is the concept
Speaker 1: of a ransomware attack. So we've recently seen ransomware attacks
Speaker 1: all over the world, right. I think they're now saying
Speaker 1: that the North Korean government might be behind these ransomware
Speaker 1: attacks that have hit like the British NHS and all
Speaker 1: these other places. As of this recording, I believe there
Speaker 1: is some speculation that that might be the case. But
Speaker 1: I was reading an expert, an expert who was saying well,
Speaker 1: we're still looking at it, so okay. But the basic
Speaker 1: concept of ransomware attack is you know, I've seen this
Speaker 1: on relatives computers before, where you boot up Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: like you. I mean, this is a classic type of attack.
Speaker 1: You boot up your computer and there's a message that says,
Speaker 1: like from Microsoft Anti Virus Protection or something, Uh, your
Speaker 1: system is not secure. You must pay to renew your
Speaker 1: anti virus license in order to boot up your system,
Speaker 1: and they ask for your credit card number, and so
Speaker 1: they're they're holding your technology hostage. In that case, they're
Speaker 1: pretending to be somebody legitimate, but they could just come
Speaker 1: right out and say, look, I've got all your files.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to let you into your phone unless
Speaker 1: you give me a hundred bucks. And that was basically
Speaker 1: how this this recent want to cry um ransom bot attack. Right.
Speaker 1: But imagine if this was applied to neurotechnology that re
Speaker 1: enabled you to move your limbs. So let's say you're
Speaker 1: out hiking with your amazing robotic legs. You've lost control
Speaker 1: of your legs, or you lost your legs in an accident.
Speaker 1: You've got robotic legs, and you're out walking around in
Speaker 1: the mountains and suddenly they lock in place and refuse
Speaker 1: to move. And then you get a text message demanding
Speaker 1: a ransom payment of five hundred dollars worth of bitcoin
Speaker 1: or your attacker will not unlock your legs. What do
Speaker 1: you do? You you gotta at least take a chance
Speaker 1: that they're going to make good on the promise. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's amazing how how sci fi things can
Speaker 1: get so quickly. I mean that that's really does not
Speaker 1: seem all that far fetched to me. Another thing might be,
Speaker 1: how about a confidentiality attack, so that that lass type
Speaker 1: of remember the three categories we mentioned earlier of neuro
Speaker 1: security categories, you want to protect to the availability, the confidentiality,
Speaker 1: and the integrity. That would be an availability attack, right
Speaker 1: they say you will not be able to use your
Speaker 1: device unless you pay up. You could have a confidentiality attack.
Speaker 1: That would be a skimming attack on your robotic arms.
Speaker 1: Say an attacker gains control of your robotic arms, then
Speaker 1: uses motion data to infer what you're typing whenever you
Speaker 1: use your fingers to type a message. Or how about
Speaker 1: an integrity attack the attacker literally makes you punch or
Speaker 1: choke yourself, or punch or choke others by taking control
Speaker 1: of your robotic hands. Well, this reminds me of a
Speaker 1: video clip that I actually included in the notes here.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if you've seen this, but it was
Speaker 1: just a was a gentleman on a believe of French
Speaker 1: news program showing off a prosthetic arm and he activates
Speaker 1: and it it begins to malfunction, and it just kind
Speaker 1: of starts pounding on the table and then pounding on
Speaker 1: the man's thigh and he can't get it to turn off.
Speaker 1: So you can easily imagine where even something wouldn't have
Speaker 1: to be is is is uh as precise as making
Speaker 1: you go karate chop crazy on people around you. But
Speaker 1: what have you just started making your arm, you know,
Speaker 1: go into sort of spasms that that could be bad enough,
Speaker 1: especially I mean if you were driving a car at
Speaker 1: the time, if you were if you were giving a
Speaker 1: public presentation. Uh, there any number of scenarios were just uh,
Speaker 1: the utter malfunction of the device would be bad enough. Now,
Speaker 1: I know a lot of you out there are probably
Speaker 1: thinking like, well, I wouldn't I wouldn't get a robotic
Speaker 1: limb like that if there are risks like this. But
Speaker 1: you're probably not putting yourself really in the frame of
Speaker 1: mind that that somebody who has lost control of a
Speaker 1: limb or lost a limb would experience. I mean, imagine
Speaker 1: not having that ability and having the technological capability to
Speaker 1: regain it. This is not something that I think people
Speaker 1: can really be faulted for wanting. No, I mean, I
Speaker 1: mean that's the thing, like is the is the if
Speaker 1: it improves the technology, it makes the technology better able
Speaker 1: to you know, let an in a visual cope with
Speaker 1: a lost limb, and then is that that technology becomes
Speaker 1: the standard. Of course people are going to adapt it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the thing people are gonna want for good reason.
Speaker 1: And it's definitely, especially at the beginning, going to seem
Speaker 1: like the risks are very low, and hopefully they will be. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So uh, I do want to say here, you know,
Speaker 1: when it comes to hackable prosthetic limbs, it isn't all
Speaker 1: black mirror paranoia. There is a lighter side as well,
Speaker 1: and this is where the Lego Prosthetic Arm comes into play.
Speaker 1: Designed by Chicago based Colombian designer Carlos Alturo Torres, and
Speaker 1: it's a modular system that allows children to customize their
Speaker 1: own prosthetics. So this is a lesson in engineering programming
Speaker 1: and a way to help them overcome the social isolation
Speaker 1: they might feel over their condition. So I just found
Speaker 1: it to be an interesting little side note. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: we already mentioned in a perhaps dangerous or detrimental context
Speaker 1: the idea of hacking your own neuro pros theses, which
Speaker 1: that that could certainly be the case. But I can
Speaker 1: also see hacking your own neuro pros thesis to be
Speaker 1: something that's very like fun and adventurous and exciting. I
Speaker 1: guess it would just depend on what the risks and
Speaker 1: and the dangers were. Oh man, what have we reached
Speaker 1: the point to just have a little fun with it?
Speaker 1: What have they a hacked? Either you hack it or
Speaker 1: you know, someone outside hacks your prosthetic arm and it
Speaker 1: makes a hand puppet and then it's able to talk
Speaker 1: specifically in the void. Who is the famous hand puppet here?
Speaker 1: I don't know. It would do kind of like a
Speaker 1: kind of like a you know, a cartoony Spanish accent
Speaker 1: to the to the talking hand. You know what I'm talking.
Speaker 1: I don't know what you're talking about, Senior Wins. Is
Speaker 1: that I don't know? No, I have no idea anyway,
Speaker 1: I can't help but imagine like a hacked robotic arm
Speaker 1: suddenly just becoming this little talking fifth It's like that
Speaker 1: it starts screaming at you. So add that to the
Speaker 1: list of near future concerns. Well, I can think of
Speaker 1: a good one is that you'd hack your own arm
Speaker 1: to just make it, at random intervals throughout the day
Speaker 1: throw up the rock horns. Then you'd have no warning
Speaker 1: when it was going to happen. You just say, like,
Speaker 1: fair warning to all my friends and family. Every now
Speaker 1: and then, I'm going to rock out. You've got to
Speaker 1: get the horns or every now and then I may
Speaker 1: just flip you off. It's not because I don't like you,
Speaker 1: it's just I've been hacked. Sorry. Uh, it becomes a
Speaker 1: great excuse. So yeah, there are multiple sides definitely to
Speaker 1: having systems that are flexible and can be manipulated. I mean,
Speaker 1: you could see that as a security risk, which it
Speaker 1: probably is, but you can also see it as an
Speaker 1: opportunity for people to express their themselves and and try
Speaker 1: new things with their own bodies. Indeed, well, in that note,
Speaker 1: you know, we should take a quick break and when
Speaker 1: we come back, we will get into some some some
Speaker 1: other possible areas where neuro technology could become hacked. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back, okay, Robert. One more type of neurotechnology that
Speaker 1: is highlighted in this original paper on neuro security is
Speaker 1: the concept of deep brain stimulation. Yes, now we I
Speaker 1: think we've talked about this some of the podcast before,
Speaker 1: but deep brain stimulation is basically putting electrodes deep inside
Speaker 1: the brain to stimulate certain regions with electrical impulses. It's
Speaker 1: uh in the basic idea is fairly simple. Of course,
Speaker 1: the implementation is very complex. Yeah. We get into this
Speaker 1: in our brain to brain communication episode, which I'll include
Speaker 1: a link to on the landing page for this episode
Speaker 1: of stuffitably your Mind dot Com. But yeah, essentially you
Speaker 1: have sort of the external version, it's kort of the
Speaker 1: god helmet scenario right where you're doing, you know, electromagnetic
Speaker 1: cranial stimulation, and then the idea of of actually putting
Speaker 1: the the the the the the devices inside the head
Speaker 1: actually having implants in the brain that are manipulating cognitive Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there's all kinds of uses of putting electrodes in
Speaker 1: the brain. Deep brain stimulation specifically is is putting them
Speaker 1: deep down in there to help with multiple types of
Speaker 1: chronic medical conditions. Specifically, it's been effective at dealing with
Speaker 1: Parkinson's disease and with tremors what you might see called
Speaker 1: essential tremor, but also contains uses that have been tried out,
Speaker 1: such as for treating major depression or for chronic pain.
Speaker 1: And so obviously, the better we get at correcting problems
Speaker 1: that begin in the brain with with electrical impulses, that
Speaker 1: that is a great thing for the people who suffer
Speaker 1: from these conditions. But when you're putting the capability to
Speaker 1: send electrical impulses deep within the brain in the hands
Speaker 1: of a piece of technology, you want to make really
Speaker 1: sure that that technology is doing what it's supposed to do.
Speaker 1: As you can guess, there could be a lot of
Speaker 1: problems with unwanted electrical mulation of the brain. And one
Speaker 1: thing I just want to quote a paragraph from the
Speaker 1: two thousand nine paper we mentioned quote, the hacker strategy
Speaker 1: does not need to be too sophisticated if he or
Speaker 1: she only wants to cause harm. It is possible to
Speaker 1: cause cell death or the formation of meaningless neural pathways
Speaker 1: by bombarding the brain with random signals. Alternately, a hacker
Speaker 1: might wirelessly prevent the device from operating as intended. We
Speaker 1: must also ensure that the deep brain stimulators protect the
Speaker 1: feelings and emotions of patients from external observation. So you
Speaker 1: can see there are a lot of avenues here. Also,
Speaker 1: deep brain stimulation was one of the things we had
Speaker 1: in mind when we talked about the idea of of
Speaker 1: illicit or dangerous self use, like if you are self
Speaker 1: administering patterns of electrical impulses that may feel pleasurable to
Speaker 1: you at the moment, but could be harmful to you
Speaker 1: in the long run. And of course this this is
Speaker 1: another another area we can imagine it being hacked for
Speaker 1: you know, on both sides, someone saying, all right, I
Speaker 1: know this device was just about you know, treating a disorder,
Speaker 1: but I'm I'm going to tinker with it, and now
Speaker 1: it gives me orgasms when I push a button. But
Speaker 1: then the reverse of that, of course, is someone actually
Speaker 1: monkeying with your cognitive performance. Yeah, uh yeah. And you
Speaker 1: can only think as things like this become more complex,
Speaker 1: there will be more and more opportunities for dangerous exploits
Speaker 1: as well. You know, basically, the possibility for dangerous exploits
Speaker 1: seems to track along with the potential for helping the brain.
Speaker 1: Right as we as we have more power to heal,
Speaker 1: we have more power to destroy. You see that with
Speaker 1: any technology, right You see those parallel tracks of the
Speaker 1: beneficial applications for humanity and then the negative, self destructive ones. Totally,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a nuclear power at the neural level. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's chemistry. You know, the same advancements that gave
Speaker 1: us all the beneficial applications of chemistry also produced chemical weapons. So,
Speaker 1: uh so I want to look at one more potential
Speaker 1: neurotechnology that could have great rewards and great risks. And
Speaker 1: so this one is going to be cognitive augmentation. So
Speaker 1: one commonly discussed example is memory augmentation. This comes with
Speaker 1: its own benefits and risks. The risks are fairly obvious.
Speaker 1: If you have the capability to augment memory, you may
Speaker 1: also have the capability to degrade a race or alter
Speaker 1: existing memories, or to create false memories or impressions. Uh
Speaker 1: and and alter the entire integrity of a person's memory system.
Speaker 1: But I got another idea, what about computational upgrades? Assuming
Speaker 1: such a thing as ever possible. We we don't really
Speaker 1: know if it is, but we'll assume for now that
Speaker 1: it could be possible to upgrade the brain's ability to say,
Speaker 1: do math or you or computational reasoning. Okay, just an
Speaker 1: implant that boosts some sort of cognitive function in your
Speaker 1: brain at your point being like either you're you're you're
Speaker 1: handling of mathematics or your memory, etcetera. Yeah, So, Robert,
Speaker 1: I got a scenario for you. Somebody offers you a
Speaker 1: free surgery that they say has a chance of increasing
Speaker 1: your i Q by twenty five points. Would you take it?
Speaker 1: Mm hmmm, I don't know that. That's pretty good, Uh,
Speaker 1: pretty good odds of success. Yeah, you don't have to answer. Now.
Speaker 1: I got one to make it a little more obvious
Speaker 1: if you if you're a person out there who's listening,
Speaker 1: and you'd say, hell, no, you know, I'm not messing
Speaker 1: around with my brain. I like my brain the way
Speaker 1: it is. I'm not going to introduce all these risks.
Speaker 1: Then consider this, What if everybody else around you has
Speaker 1: taken this. Yeah, so all of your friends, your co workers,
Speaker 1: everybody in your professional circle, all of your professional rivals,
Speaker 1: they all take the upgrade. This is a This is
Speaker 1: a big issue in trans humanist thought. You know, who
Speaker 1: gets to be trans human? And what does it mean
Speaker 1: to say no to some sort of trans human experience
Speaker 1: such as a you know, a surgical implant that that
Speaker 1: boost your cognitive ability. Well, I'm just talking about voluntary willingness.
Speaker 1: So of course the question of who this is available
Speaker 1: to is a big question, But it's a different question
Speaker 1: I'm saying. Let's let's just assume we're in a crazy
Speaker 1: scenario where it's freely available to everyone, and the only
Speaker 1: question is do you want it? Will you voluntarily take it?
Speaker 1: I'm not sure you're you're in the situation where if
Speaker 1: you're if you're the first person, you'd probably say like, no,
Speaker 1: I don't think I want that, it's too weird. If
Speaker 1: you're the last person, you would probably be desperate to
Speaker 1: catch up, Right, Would you voluntarily choose to remain at
Speaker 1: a cognitive deficit to everybody else around you who has
Speaker 1: upgraded themselves. I mean that's the thing. People are going
Speaker 1: to take the risk. People are going to be hungry
Speaker 1: enough to take the risk. Some people are going to
Speaker 1: be comfortable enough not to but for how long? Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is where we get into a scenario of something
Speaker 1: that I would call maybe this isn't the best term
Speaker 1: for it, but I'm going to try this out. The
Speaker 1: term is irresistible availability, and so I'm going to posit
Speaker 1: that bring computer interfaces and certain types of neural augmentation
Speaker 1: cognitive augmentation, if they're possible, they are going to fall
Speaker 1: into this category of irresistible availability. So I would say,
Speaker 1: you know, consumer technology that looks scary at first tends
Speaker 1: to go through several phases. Of course, you've got the
Speaker 1: lab phase, right, You've got the alpha and beta phase.
Speaker 1: It's fairly contained, constrained. It's testing with people who are
Speaker 1: part who are in on the game basically, and then
Speaker 1: you've got to you've got a release, and you've got
Speaker 1: early adopters. These are people who are technologically adventurous and
Speaker 1: they start using this new thing. They tend to like
Speaker 1: to show off its advantages. They're more willing to accept
Speaker 1: risks that are, you know, that haven't been worked out yet.
Speaker 1: They're willing to get along with the kinks that haven't
Speaker 1: been solved. Then the intermediate adopters weighed in and at
Speaker 1: some point a new technology that originally seemed scary weird
Speaker 1: and unnecessary reaches a tipping point of convenience advantage and
Speaker 1: widespread adoption. And I would say there's definitely a social
Speaker 1: element to this. It's not just the true, you know,
Speaker 1: financial or time convenience it provides, but it's the fact
Speaker 1: that everybody else is doing it. And at some point
Speaker 1: it goes from something that I don't need and that
Speaker 1: scares me to something I couldn't imagine living without. And
Speaker 1: you can see this in many in many contexts. You
Speaker 1: think back to cell phones. How cell phones went from
Speaker 1: a like weird and unnecessary thing that extravagance. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: characters and movies had cell phones, especially in their car.
Speaker 1: Remember when I still enjoy watching like, you know, eighties
Speaker 1: films where there's a super villain of some sort in
Speaker 1: a crappy be movie. Of course they have that big,
Speaker 1: bulky car phone. You're like, Oh, imagine a world which
Speaker 1: someone makes a phone call from their car. Do you
Speaker 1: remember when paying for something online with a credit card
Speaker 1: was this really weird, scary and unnecessary thing. I specifically
Speaker 1: remember that thing, like, why would anybody ever use a
Speaker 1: credit card to pay for something on the internet. That's insane? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's what you do. You call an eight hundred
Speaker 1: number and credit card that way, and then think about
Speaker 1: maybe mobile banking and transactions, ride sharing apps like Uber
Speaker 1: and lift. You just think about this progression from scary
Speaker 1: and unnecessary to fundamental. It's the progress of irresistible availability.
Speaker 1: And I very much think that neurotechnology could easily go
Speaker 1: in the same direction as it because the advantage has
Speaker 1: become more clear as the risks sort of get blurry
Speaker 1: and and go out of focus because so many people
Speaker 1: are using it. Uh, it just starts to look more
Speaker 1: and more like something that you can't go without. And
Speaker 1: then once you've tried it, you're in the pool. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, I just keep thinking back to flying, like
Speaker 1: if if if flying makes sense and an airline, then
Speaker 1: everything makes sense. Yeah. You're clearly defining the will of
Speaker 1: God by getting in this machine and ascending like a bird. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, everything else is on the table too. Yeah. Man,
Speaker 1: And they don't even try to make it pleasant anymore,
Speaker 1: and people still can't stop doing it. Yeah, like they
Speaker 1: don't have to sugarcoat it. Yeah, you're in a flying
Speaker 1: death machine. I'm on board. Well, actually, to speak of
Speaker 1: death machines, of course, the classic comparison here is the car,
Speaker 1: the automobile, which is far more potentially deadly than just
Speaker 1: flying on an airline. Yeah. Imagine cars were new and
Speaker 1: nobody drove them, and they were just brand new invention,
Speaker 1: just now being debuted. And they told you, Okay, on average,
Speaker 1: about thirty three thousand people a year are going to
Speaker 1: die in these machines in the United States alone. Do
Speaker 1: you want one? Yeah, you would, you would say, I
Speaker 1: don't know. That sounds kind of dangerous. But the thing
Speaker 1: is we were born into this world. We're born into
Speaker 1: the world of the automobile, and so you just take
Speaker 1: it for granted. Yeah, these are the these are this
Speaker 1: is the roll of the dice we take every day.
Speaker 1: So of course it's normal. The convenience creeps in, the
Speaker 1: widespread adoption makes it look normal and okay, and so
Speaker 1: it's irresistible availability. It's just ubiquitous and you can't get
Speaker 1: around it. Yeah, and even things that are not available
Speaker 1: to everyone just become increasingly normal. Like I keep thinking
Speaker 1: back to uh too, like Time magazine headlines about test
Speaker 1: tube babies back in seven nineties. Oh yeah, the like
Speaker 1: original stigma about IVF. Yeah, and of course that has
Speaker 1: become It just became increasingly normal, just increasingly every day,
Speaker 1: like today. It's just another reproductive option that's on the table.
Speaker 1: And I mean, I think that was also influenced then
Speaker 1: by by social social stigma and certainly like misogyny, certain
Speaker 1: ideas about about you know, people trying to control what
Speaker 1: women's bodies are for. But yes, there is Yeah, just
Speaker 1: the technological ask act alone certainly has become more more accepted. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it seems undeniable that will see the same thing
Speaker 1: occur with these various the idea of neural implants. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this stuff may becoming a lot sooner than we think.
Speaker 1: So we we've talked about how there's already deep brain
Speaker 1: stimulation and robotic limbs. These are already in development. They
Speaker 1: already in some cases work pretty well. It's just a
Speaker 1: question of them being deployed more in the wild and
Speaker 1: becoming more widely available. But the question of cognitive augmentation,
Speaker 1: that's still more of a future concern. We haven't really
Speaker 1: discovered any strong entry ways into that arena of technology yet,
Speaker 1: but we could be closing that gap really fast, is
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. So, how about neural lace elon musk Oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: the neural lace. I love this idea because of course
Speaker 1: that the the The guy who coined the term neural
Speaker 1: lace is sci fi author Ian in Banks, one of
Speaker 1: my personal favorites always comes back to the Banks here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and in his books, there's the culture which is this
Speaker 1: uh anarco utopian um far future society, and everybody in
Speaker 1: the culture has all these transhumanist adaptation such as like
Speaker 1: drug glands that they can they can gland various substances
Speaker 1: to change how they're feeling, and they all have this
Speaker 1: neural lace that enhances cognitive ability and kind of gives
Speaker 1: them a Basically, they're they're they're tied into a vast
Speaker 1: sea of information that they can call up as they need.
Speaker 1: So basically the idea is it is a way of
Speaker 1: robustly connecting the brain to the external information systems of
Speaker 1: the Internet or whatever their future version of the Internet is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it would be like Google Brain. Yeah, uh yeah. So
Speaker 1: that's pretty close to what Musque seems to have in mind. Obviously,
Speaker 1: we're not there yet, but we do have prototypes of
Speaker 1: this sort of technology. It's it's nowhere near uh In
Speaker 1: in Banks level yet, but in March, Elon Musk was
Speaker 1: in the news promoting this new neurotext artupp called neural Link,
Speaker 1: which he basically plans to use as the vanguard of
Speaker 1: the coming neuro cyborg movement. And the idea of the
Speaker 1: neural lace is really the short version is it's this
Speaker 1: ultrafined mesh material that can be injected into the brain
Speaker 1: case with the needles. You get the needle inside the
Speaker 1: skull and you inject this mesh material over the outside
Speaker 1: of the brain, where it naturally unfurls to cover the
Speaker 1: outer surface of the cortices, and from here it melds
Speaker 1: with the brain and can offer supposedly extremely precise electrical
Speaker 1: feedback and electrical control of brain activity what they would
Speaker 1: call a quote direct cortical interface. And supposedly trial versions
Speaker 1: of this have been deployed in mice with apparently very
Speaker 1: few side effects, and so in the short term this
Speaker 1: might prove a useful treatment for various neurological disorders, you know,
Speaker 1: age associated neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and other neurological disorders.
Speaker 1: But Musk is not shy about the sci fi stuff.
Speaker 1: He's He's into his other motive, which is that ultimately
Speaker 1: he's interested in cognitive upgrades. He wants cognitive augmentation of
Speaker 1: the human brain. And one of the main reasons he's
Speaker 1: given publicly is that Musk is one of these people
Speaker 1: who's concerned about existential risk from artificial intelligence. So we've
Speaker 1: talked about this a little bit on the podcast before.
Speaker 1: We I think we talked about it in our Transhumanist
Speaker 1: Rapture War episodes, but maybe we should do a whole
Speaker 1: episode or episode series on this sometimes, because I do
Speaker 1: think the question of the risks posed by artificial intelligence
Speaker 1: is interesting, and one of the reasons it's interesting is
Speaker 1: that it's one of these questions where really smart people
Speaker 1: who really know what they're talking about, are totally on
Speaker 1: both sides of the issue. You hear people saying we
Speaker 1: need to be worrying about existential risk from AI right now,
Speaker 1: and other smart people are saying these people are lunatics.
Speaker 1: You this is not a concern. And not sure which
Speaker 1: side of the the issue I fall on. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: kind of depends on whose argument I'm reading. I kind
Speaker 1: of fall in line with with whoever whatever the last
Speaker 1: rational argument happen on the matter. Yeah, I guess I'm there.
Speaker 1: I I consider myself highly persuadable on this topic still,
Speaker 1: but anyway, Musk is one of these people who says, look,
Speaker 1: creating superhuman artificial intelligence is a genuine risk to us.
Speaker 1: We at the very least risk becoming irrelevant, if not
Speaker 1: risk being destroyed. And so he thinks that in order
Speaker 1: to avoid becoming irrelevant or worse in the face of
Speaker 1: superhuman AI, we've got to be willing to upgrade our
Speaker 1: brains to keep up with the machines. In other words,
Speaker 1: the only way to make sure that you don't fall
Speaker 1: victim to machine intelligence is to merge with it to
Speaker 1: become Yeah, and in his view, neural lace might be
Speaker 1: one way to get us there, giving us the power
Speaker 1: to augment our bio brains with your neurotechnology to become
Speaker 1: superhuman mind hybrids. So if the if the the AI
Speaker 1: got is essentially a cat's cradle design, we want to
Speaker 1: make sure we're the fingers. We want to make sure
Speaker 1: we're uh, you know, an important aspect of its spiritual body. Yeah,
Speaker 1: even if we're not, it's and I mean, we also
Speaker 1: don't want to be just some irrelevant obstacle to whatever
Speaker 1: its goals. Are we want to be thoroughly integrated with
Speaker 1: it and its motives. Yeah, which kind of comes back
Speaker 1: to n in Banks. That's that that's kind of how
Speaker 1: he he weaves the humans and the humanoids of the
Speaker 1: culture into everything, Like they're the minds, the ai s
Speaker 1: that that ultimately rule everything and are making all the
Speaker 1: hard decisions. They see the value and having human operatives,
Speaker 1: and they also have this is kind of like like
Speaker 1: hard hard part of their programming, Like I guess they're
Speaker 1: sort of corporate culture, is that there's something important about
Speaker 1: human life. Yeah. Now, if you're still one of those
Speaker 1: people out there saying, Okay, I'm just never going to
Speaker 1: get any kind of neurological implants that By the way,
Speaker 1: I'm not advising people never get neurological implants. I'm more
Speaker 1: saying that the people designing these things really need to
Speaker 1: be thinking super hard about security from day one. I
Speaker 1: guess we're way past day one, but from day whatever.
Speaker 1: This is right now, But you don't just have to
Speaker 1: worry about the future of neurological influence from technology if
Speaker 1: you get an implant. There are other ways to influence
Speaker 1: the brain with technology. Yeah, yeah, I mean I mentioned
Speaker 1: this a little bit earlier. But I think another potential
Speaker 1: exploit exploitation would be, uh, you know, if you had
Speaker 1: some manner of external fine tuned electromagnetic cranial stimulation device,
Speaker 1: perhaps when the aids of the treatment of a psychological condition,
Speaker 1: or perhaps even works recreationally. Imagine malware or hacking scheme
Speaker 1: that turns such brain functioning management on its ear. You know,
Speaker 1: how fast would you be able to rip the thing off?
Speaker 1: And oh, I can't use it uh in anymore? You know,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have to go a day. I'm gonna have
Speaker 1: to bring this thing into the shop. How am I
Speaker 1: going to get across down without my uh my, my
Speaker 1: god helmet to get me there? Now, these external devices
Speaker 1: I think are a little less plausible on this account
Speaker 1: than implanted devices are because they're less precise. Right, So
Speaker 1: you've got transcranial electrical stimulation, also transcranial magnetic stimulation, these
Speaker 1: things that you know, yeah, play electromagnetic force to the
Speaker 1: outside of the head. Uh. When I've seen experiments with
Speaker 1: these types of things so far, the results they're able
Speaker 1: to induce in the brain are very very blunt and broad,
Speaker 1: if you know what I mean. They're not nearly the
Speaker 1: kinds of minute targeted results that you would get by
Speaker 1: implanting electrical devices inside the skull or inside the brain. Still,
Speaker 1: if it keeps me from from auditing my body theting's appropriately,
Speaker 1: then it's gonna ruin my week. Yeah. So so on
Speaker 1: one hand, I do think this is a real concern.
Speaker 1: And I should also mention that one of the other
Speaker 1: papers we looked at was a paper by Saldi Costa,
Speaker 1: Dale R. Stevens, and Jeremy A. Hansen in UH from
Speaker 1: the International Conference on Human Aspects of Information Security, Privacy
Speaker 1: and Trust from and essentially what they look at is
Speaker 1: trying to create a broad architecture for an intrusion prevention
Speaker 1: system for brain computer interfaces. That's kind of a hard
Speaker 1: thing to design at this point, because you know, you
Speaker 1: don't know exactly what all these systems are gonna look like.
Speaker 1: But the basic system they come up with is that,
Speaker 1: you know, you'd you'd have a two tiered security system
Speaker 1: where any UH in Internet or external input coming into
Speaker 1: the brain has to go through what's known as an
Speaker 1: intrusion prevention system, which is just a system that tries
Speaker 1: to screen traffic passing into a network or a machine,
Speaker 1: and if traffic looks suspicious, it says, sorry, you can't
Speaker 1: go in, And then you'd have to pair that with
Speaker 1: And I love this sort of the brain equivalent of
Speaker 1: an anti virus program. Anti virus program looks at what
Speaker 1: code is executing on this computer right now, what what
Speaker 1: executive functions are happening, and if it sees suspicious activity,
Speaker 1: it shuts it down. The brain version would have to
Speaker 1: use some kind of signal processing to look at what's
Speaker 1: happening in the brain, or in the or in the
Speaker 1: neural device and say, does any of this looks suspicious,
Speaker 1: like something the brain wouldn't normally be doing, and if so,
Speaker 1: you might have to disconnect the neural device or shut
Speaker 1: it down. Yeah, and this is an area where I
Speaker 1: can just imagine this kind of instead of going just
Speaker 1: full fledged face forward into a thought police scenario, we're
Speaker 1: kind of backing into one, because you end up with
Speaker 1: a situation where potentially where you have we're human cognition.
Speaker 1: Is this byproduct of organic and machine right become increasingly
Speaker 1: cyborg it's it becomes and then therefore any kind of
Speaker 1: intrusive thoughts or even criminal thoughts, it becomes kind of
Speaker 1: like bad behavior in a dog, right, not a wild dog,
Speaker 1: but a pet animal because whatever, what always happens, Like
Speaker 1: people are saying, oh, well is this because the is this?
Speaker 1: The owner's thought is that the dog's fault. And it
Speaker 1: is there any way to really distinguish between all of
Speaker 1: these things because the condition of the dog is so
Speaker 1: manipulated and so changed by its relationship with humans. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a very good point. I mean, I can see
Speaker 1: a scenario where in the future people might have say,
Speaker 1: you've got a deep brain stimulator in your head, or
Speaker 1: you've just got neural lace or something like that, some
Speaker 1: kind of neuroperipheral technology that changes the way your brain works,
Speaker 1: and then you do something that you say that didn't
Speaker 1: seem like me. Did the neuroprosthetic make me do it.
Speaker 1: Let's say I went and robbed a bank. Could I
Speaker 1: sue the company that made my neuroprosthetics and say this
Speaker 1: is totally out of character for me. I don't know
Speaker 1: why I did that. I never would have robbed a
Speaker 1: bank normally, And I think what happened is that my
Speaker 1: neuroprosthetic malfunctioned and it artificially pumped up my aggressiveness and
Speaker 1: lowered my inhibitions and did all this stuff that temporary
Speaker 1: really turned me into a bank robber, and that's not
Speaker 1: my biological brain's fault. Or it could be that you
Speaker 1: went to the wrong website, you clicked on something you
Speaker 1: you shouldn't have, and that somehow that managed to like
Speaker 1: follow up the chain to your brain itself and alter
Speaker 1: your behavior. Oh, I didn't even think about that with neuroprosthetics.
Speaker 1: So it could be something you click on on the Internet,
Speaker 1: or some search you do on Amazon can now not
Speaker 1: only follow you around it showing you ads at different websites,
Speaker 1: but it can follow you into your brain. Or maybe
Speaker 1: they didn't even hack you, say they hacked an advertisement
Speaker 1: that you passed, and that advertisement communicates with devices that
Speaker 1: you have that you know, so that it can you
Speaker 1: can figure out what your behavior is and you know,
Speaker 1: feed you the right advertisements, maybe in your dreams or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah uh yeah. So the main thing, my main point
Speaker 1: in this episode is that I think that we cannot
Speaker 1: depend on the consumers opting out as a way to
Speaker 1: avoid these risks because of this this irresistible availability thing.
Speaker 1: As these things become more available, become more widespread, and
Speaker 1: become more useful. People are just not going to be
Speaker 1: able to resist the urge to use them. And uh
Speaker 1: and in some cases there you know, if you suffer
Speaker 1: like an injury or a disability or something, there's no
Speaker 1: reason you you you should want to resist them, right,
Speaker 1: They will give you lost functionality back. I mean, unless
Speaker 1: there's an end to the advancement technology or say there's
Speaker 1: a buttle arian jahad and and people as as you
Speaker 1: know in mass decide no, we we you know, we're
Speaker 1: not going to cross this point. We're gonna put in
Speaker 1: place laws that keep us from augmenting ourselves and becoming
Speaker 1: and thinking like machines. Yeah. So I'm saying you can't
Speaker 1: depend on the individual consumer or patient to opt out.
Speaker 1: That that is not something that should be part of
Speaker 1: the thinking on this. It should be that security concerns
Speaker 1: are absolutely take can into consideration from day whatever this
Speaker 1: is now, because it's never from day one, it's always
Speaker 1: going to be like day you gotta you gotta be
Speaker 1: ahead of those brain hackers. Yeah, all right, so there
Speaker 1: you have it. Hopefully we gave everyone some you know ace,
Speaker 1: you know, definitely some some room for a little paranoia
Speaker 1: and a little sci fi wondering, for sure, but also
Speaker 1: just some some some real facts about technology and security
Speaker 1: and how the how the the footfalls tend to go
Speaker 1: in this trek, and one hopes those footfalls are chosen
Speaker 1: by one's own free will. Yes indeed so hey. If
Speaker 1: you want to uh learn more about this topic, head
Speaker 1: on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: That's where we'll find all of our podcast episodes, blog posts,
Speaker 1: links out to our various social media accounts such as
Speaker 1: face but Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram. We're on all those things,
Speaker 1: and the landing page for this episode will include some
Speaker 1: links out to the some of the sources we talked
Speaker 1: about here today. And if you want to get in
Speaker 1: touch with us directly to of us feedback on this
Speaker 1: episode or any other, or to let us know if
Speaker 1: you think you would accept a voluntarily opt in neuro enhancement,
Speaker 1: or if you want to suggest topics for the future
Speaker 1: or anything like that, you can always email us at
Speaker 1: blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com, lovel bl